My wife and I are first generation farmers and our farm is Wauka Meadows Sustainable Farm, in Clermont, GA, where we farm along with our two children. We started farming 18 years ago when my mother got cancer, she passed after a 3 year fight. We started by leasing land in different areas and now live on the property we farm. We started with 25 chickens, 4 calves and 2 pigs, using regenerative farming practices. We added more animals each year, selling our products at different farmer markets and online. Fast forward to the summer of 2024. We ordered our chicks like we did every 2 years but this time the hatcheries we used were all sold out. We found some started pullets, 18 week old chickens that aren't laying yet, and they were to be delivered at the first of this year. Three days before they were going to deliver them the county they were in went into quarantine. The birds were tested every week and they never tested positive for anything. Every time they would have a new case of the bird flu, the quarantine would start over. They held them so long that they had to move them to a laying house in the state they were in, we never got our birds. We still had our old birds at the time, but they had gone down to a 25% laying rate and we had been losing money on feeding them, and not getting enough eggs to cover the feed, for the previous couple of months. At that time every hatchery was sold out until fall and with egg sales being 95% of our income we knew it wasn't looking good. We started buying every chick that people were hatching locally and even our son started hitting up different Tractor Supply stores buying what he could. We stopped butchering our cows, incase we needed money on a short notice, and would take a couple to the local auctions. We are down to a handful of cows, and our bull, so we have something to build our herd back from. That's what has gotten us this far. After we had rounded up about 1,300 chicks, over the course of a couple of months, I got a call from the guy that had the started pullets. He found us another batch of started pullets. Our previous flock of chickens was around 2,000 birds and the New flock was a total of 5,000 birds. We got our new birds but they weren't as old as they were supposed to be and they were 2 to 3 weeks different in age. We still needed them but we would have put them on chick starter if we would have known. It seemed like it rained the first month they were here and that didn't help with them growing or building up their immune systems. We had storms come through a couple of weeks apart and each storm took out our egg mobiles, where the chickens lay and roost at, one at a time, even though I had moved them off the hills in preparation of the storms. All of our nesting boxes were destroyed along with the egg mobiles. We salvaged what we could off of them and took down our corral boards and rebuilt the egg mobiles. We found some old nesting boxes locally and cleaned them up to use. Now we are waiting on all the chickens to start laying. Some have started, but slacked off during these high temperatures we've been having. We're feeding $250 a day in chicken feed, with no income for the last 6 months. We've held on as long as we can, spent all of our savings and gotten behind on everything, trying to get through this. If we were 3rd or 4th generation farmers we would own our land and could borrow money against it to help. We don't get any farm subsidies or money from the government, we never have or never will. We've had some customers tell me we needed to let our customers know and ask for help, and that's not easy for me. I'm one that would rather burn everything down than say I need help, but we do need it. If we can make it another week, we won't make it a second week. We've been through more than I thought we could stand, harassed by government officials along the way, all to just try to save the farm. Some people have said I need to quit and go back to construction, but farming has touched and helped more people than construction ever did. So we need everyone that can to help if believe in what we're trying to do, whether you're a customer or a follower on one of our social media pages. You can see our journey on our Facebook page. Thank you for even reading this far and a big thank you if you're able to help.